Susan L. Hayes, M.P.A., is senior researcher for The Commonwealth Fund's Tracking Health System Performance initiative. In this role she supports the Scorecard Project, actively participating in the selection/development, research, and analysis of national, state, local, and special-population-level health system performance measures, and coauthoring Scorecard reports and related publications. Previously, Ms. Hayes was research associate for Policy, Research, and Evaluation. In this role, she provided writing, editing, and research in support of analysis of Fund-sponsored surveys, policy analysis, and public presentations.

Ms. Hayes joined the Fund after completing the Master of Public Administration program at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, where she specialized in health policy, with extensive coursework in economics and policy analysis, and she won the Martin Dworkis Memorial Award for academic achievement and public service. Ms. Hayes graduated from Dartmouth College with an A.B. in English in and began a distinguished career in journalism working as an editorial assistant at PC Magazine anda senior editor at National Geographic Kids and later at Woman’s Day magazine. Following that period, Ms. Hayes was a freelance health writer and a contributing editor to Parent & Child magazine and cowrote a book on raising bilingual children with a pediatrician at Tufts Medical Center.

While at NYU Wagner, Ms. Hayes interned for the NYC Office of Citywide Health Insurance Access in 2010 and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities Service and was a project associate for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, working on the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s new models of insurance coverage and care delivery in rural New Jersey.

Mission

The mission of The Commonwealth Fund is to promote a high-performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable, including low-income people, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.